


The unkindest cut

by therewasagirl



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-10
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-09-16 15:43:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9278453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therewasagirl/pseuds/therewasagirl
Summary: She smiles in self-depreciation. "But you’re right, we did play god. We knew it too. It was easier to pretend that what we had discovered was more important than the moral ambiguity it laid on, when the subjects involved seemed so willing and so… so…""Devoid of humanity?" Oliver suggests, his tone studiously casual.





	1. 1. Enemies

**Author's Note:**

> i was cleaning my drafts the other night and found one AU I had been working on a long while ago, where Oliver was a ‘candidate’ in a secret governmental program for creating a ‘better soldier’ and Felicity was part of the scientific staff that made the program possible (i.e. they are natural enemies, in a way.) They both break out of their ‘paths’ in their own ways and their journeys end up crossing – they clash, as they escape, and escape together. 
> 
> anyway, im wanted to upload the pieces of it I have. they’re very random as far as the timeline of the story goes, and not even that polished, but whatever. Enjoy.

He doesn’t know, even after almost three months with her, jumping from place to place to escape their ever present pursuers, what she meant that first night.

They had laid down to sleep on the floor, side by side in tiny bunks the discomfort of which meant nothing to him, but that he was sure must make her uncomfortable. Exhaustion was fast to catch up to her, lids becoming heavy and her eyes taking longer to blink open each time she closed them. So she’d mumbled really, of how he had been the hardest for her to face, somehow.

The softly spoken words had zapped him, but after that her breathing had evened out and he’d known she was asleep. She slept like that, without the smallest twitch for the next 12 hours, and it would have taken a better man than Oliver not to be a little bit jealous of that. But what really kept him awake for quite a while after she slept was his bran wondering on what she could have meant by those words.

She doesn’t bring it up again and neither does he, but sometimes his mind goes back to that first night over and over. She tracks him always, never losing sight of him for a moment as if he is her lifeline. He is, of course. She'd be dead without him and they both know it, but it was something… not different, but _else_ to it, sometimes. Something charged and heavy that made him uncomfortably aware of himself and her.

If she hadn’t done what she had done, Oliver knew he would like her effortlessly.

It bothers him.

He asks her one night, when the sky is dark, without a single star or moon to shine on them and the air thick with the heavy press of a tropical storm approaching. The rain starts pouring, leaking in from the thatched roof of their hut.

He can barely see her, but he does not imagine how she went utterly still.

“I said that, huh.”

“You did.”

She nods, not trying to deny it. She’s not one for false realities, Felicity Smoak. Which makes him wonder just how willingly she participated in the programs that created him and what kind of person she is to do that, really.

"This is going to sound… it's not exactly fair to you, what I’m about to say." Felicity warns.

“I’m not asking because I thought it would be.”

"Right.” She looks away from him, stares right head at nothing. “You were just so… you _never_ sat still, you were always talking about one thing or another. Teasing."

She gives him a knowing look and Oliver looks down, not really trying to hide his smile. His hand reaches blindly - he knows she's moving too and will meet him halfway. It’s become a way to reassure one another.

He'd teased, sure. She was beautiful; distant but not unkind, always so polite. Always so easy to blush, even when she kept on task. She was the youngest in the group of scientists and doctors that took care of him, and they all deferred to her in one way or another. It had been interesting to watch. She had been a fixture Oliver had not minded having. He’d needed her because he wanted answers, but it hadn’t been just that. It had been that she was just emotional enough to actually have a response to him, humanly speaking.

She had been less experienced than the others surrounding her at blinding herself. That too had been obvious.

"You were practically bursting with your own personality.” Felicity continues. “It was impossible to ignore you as a person. It made me uncomfortable."

The admission weights between them.

For all their amicable talk and their easy partnership, the truth of their situation never escaped them. She had built the cage that had locked him in.

"The others, they were different?"

Felicity looks at him as if she is unsure of what to say, how to say it. For a woman that always knows what is what, the hesitation goes a long way to show how uncomfortable she is with the topic.

But they can’t postpone it forever.

"Yes. Mostly they were quiet, very… I don’t know, blank?" she says the word as if she is defying some unspoken rule. "They spoke rarely, if ever. Seemed pretty content to just sit there and do as they were told or quietly glare and try to appear as intimidating as possible without moving."

Oliver tenses.

“Did any of them… any of us, ever attack one of the staff at the clinic?”

She smiles. “No. The closest thing we’ve had to an incident was you penchant for flirting."

Oliver rolls his eyes at her. At one point or another, he had told her she was beautiful and funny and that her ass was perfect despite the lab coat they made her wear even though she was in engineering, in thirteen different languages, some of them quite obscure. She didn’t know that of course. Nor would she.

Felicity’s smile falls and she looks away. “And the shooting, of course. That also counts as an incident, I guess.”

Right. The shooting that had killed every single UNIDAC employee except for her and a friend of hers that killed herself a few days later. ( _Killed herself was a loose term, especially since Oliver had barely saved Felicity from a squad of agents that had also been send to her house to help arrange her suicide too_.)

"I don’t know how to explain to you what it is, to be the first person to discover something.." Felicity says slowly, sitting up so that she can look at him better. "It was… I was able to do something that- it was like creating a miracle. And that was a high that obscured everything else. I mean, we’re talking about restructuring human DNA. Do you know what that means? What it would mean for people?”

It sounds like a bit desperate but even in as little time as he’s known her, Oliver knows that she’s not one to really plead for anything, and even now, it’s not about him agreeing with her, as much as needing to be understood.

And he does understand. He doesn’t even need to imagine it. He was inside those labs, the one being poked and prodded. He’s met the people that came out of those white halls. Soldiers with no empathy and no pain sensibility, no fear.

“I’m not talking about just better soldiers.” She says irritably. “That’s not what this is about.”

Felicity sighs heavily, hand going through her hair.

“I can see the logic of it, of course. Every major scientific discovery has first been used to fabricate a weapon. Offensive thinking – that’s the like of survival of every government out there. But there is so much more to it than that. Think of all the diseases that are caused by genetic alterations and defects, about incurable sickness that kill thousands of people in horrendous ways. It’s always been a part of medicine where every aspect of science gave up, and instead of curing the disease we limited ourselves to abating symptoms.” Her eyes shine with barely suppressed passion. “Now we don’t have to. Parkinsons, ASL - all of them could be cured. I was a single step away from being able to cure infantile leukemia. How many people can say that?”

Oliver just looks at her, impassive. He doesn’t know what to think, not really. Blame her, thank her. Hate her for her part in what they did to him; admire her for her perseverance in what she does despite of it.

Its entwined. Despite the resentment he feels for how he was used, he can’t help but feel that out of all the people that deserve violence, the doc and her medical staff were really a bit closer to the bottom of the list than the other people who used her creations to hurt.

So he shrugs in the face of her question.

“I dunno doc. You and god, I guess.”

She flinches and looks away, but not fast enough to hide the shiny eyes.

“But you’re right. We did play god. We knew it too.” She smiles in self-depreciation. "It was easier to pretend that what we had discovered was more important than the moral ambiguity it laid on, when the subjects involved seemed so willing and so… so…"

She falters and realizes that for all her bluntness, she can’t say this aloud after spending so much time with him, really getting to know him and know the depths of how wrong she’d been. She can’t say it, out of care for him, respect, fear of his reaction or plain shame - it doesn’t matter which. Maybe a bit of all of those.

She can’t say it, but he can.

"Devoid of humanity?" Oliver suggests, his tone studiously casual.

Her eyes snap on his face, startled and wide. Felicity has learned to see patterns to his behaviors and whenever he gets so neutral, he is acting - its arranged and specific.

"No, that's- that's not what I meant at all." She breathes out, shaking her head a little.

He looks at her impassively and she knows he doesn’t believe her.

"On the contrary, I never… That blankness I’m talking about made it easier to keep a clinical distance. To see nothing but test subjects, lab results and the living proof that what I was doing was important enough to- it made it easier to fog up the morality of human experimentation, because you were all so _obviously_ human. Only better at it."

She is fidgeting with her hands, eyes turned inwards. Oliver doubts she is aware at the moment that he is there with her.

"Do you remember your last exam?” She asks him suddenly. “How you asked me what I thought you did out there?"

"I knew you were soldiers. We were financed directly by the Department of Defense and all the physicals and mental evaluations passed through my desk at one point or another. Of course I knew the participants were all ex-military."

She gulps down thickly.

At this point Oliver has to sit up and come eye to eye level with her.

"We weren’t the normal kind of soldier, Felicity."

“Of course you weren’t. Nothing about you is normal. Though seeing that in action in Maryland was a bit… different from just knowing the genetic engineering of it all.” She admits. Felicity had never seen other soldiers in combat so she had no grounds to compare - but even she could tell that fundamental difference that set him apart from just another ex-Army.

“No, I mean…” He isn’t really sure how come he is talking about this now but nothing is stopping him, so he just does. It’s not so much a choice to share as it’s a choice not to stop himself from doing it. “We were all trained for deep cover infiltration. The kind that would be undetectable in places where no US soldier or spy could ever get to.”

“Oh. That actually makes sense.”

He frowns? “How?”

“You’re so charming I always wondered if they trained you in that too. I guess they do, in a way.”

Oliver huffs a surprised laugh. “You could say that, yes. I know how to read people.”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m sure I was transparent.”

His lips curve up a little. “Yes, but then again, you knew you were so nothing about you ever really fit a foregone conclusion.”

“Huh. I guess I’m flattered.”

They stop and stare at the gathering storm on the black horizon, the silence between them calmer.

She doesn’t ask him what he used to do though he knows she is burning with curiously. He’s never met anyone who is always so hungry for knowledge. It’s kind of off-putting sometimes, thinking she would devour anything, if it interests her, good or bad. But one look at her face makes Oliver wonder if this time she doesn’t ask because she dreads it a little. He knows she thinks whatever he did she helped him do it. He knows by the way she doesn’t look away from him, despite not trying very hard to mask her feelings. She has trouble knowing when to stop, but she is also the kind of person that will face it head on.

She's brave like that.

He tells her all he knows. Everything - starting with how he got into ARGUS, the first subjects, Hong Kong, Moscow and the entailing ops. How the training programs developed from violent conditioning to miniscule genetic enhancements that made him what he is. He tells her about LEAGU-E, that it’s supposed to be the next step to whatever he is. As he talks eh realizes that no matter her skills in warping secrets out of computers like it was magic, there are things she doesn’t know.

He is blunt when he describes his training, the ones that came before him. what was done to them, what it made them do. He tells her that they have to do something to help Lyla Michaels along with her investigation into ARGUS and its more dubious practices, and she is almost breathless by the end of it. But she says yes.

He knew she would.

She is brave like that, despite everything else she is.

Still, he doesn’t bring up their experience in the labs again for a while. It’s not that he thinks he’s wrong. What was done to him made him a monster, but those that made him that way were just as monstrous in his eyes. He is not blaming her for what she meant to do, but what she actually _did_.

She knows that. It’s why she can’t look at him in the eye sometimes.

But no, he leaves this aside because they are on the run, and there is no place for discord. They need to work together. She needs him to survive and he needs her to tell him what is and is not essential every time they gather data. He’s found out she’s pretty good at hacking too. Better than he was trained to be, which is saying something.

In truth, he really didn’t like fighting with her, and that too was a reason to stop prodding at both their scabs.


	2. 2. Sara Lance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: League, Arrow, HIVE - in this story these are names of black ops training programs. Sara was in the first one, League. Oliver trained with the Arrow program and the agents send after him and Felicity are a newer version still, called HIVE.

The  first time they meet Sara Lance, they are in Tokyo and the room Oliver and Felicity were staying in gets demolished in under 30 seconds.

It’s one of the most grotesque display of violence Felicity has ever seen. Everything that isn’t nailed to the floor is used to strike some blow that should have been fatal. Even though Sara Lance had been part of the League program, which had preceded Arrow and had been, in many ways, primitive in the violence it introduced to the psyche, Oliver and Sara go toe to toe in the damage they cause each other.

After the first shock has abated ( _and Lance and Oliver threw each other against opposite sides of the wall, breathing hard a moment before they can go back to trying their best to rip each other to pieces_ ), Felicity screams for them to stop. It sidetracks them long enough to allow them some situational awareness, just enough for them both to realize that their behavioral reflexes are going to get them both killed. And hopefully stop them from _trying_ so hard anyway.

“Please!” she says with enough heat to make Lance believe it. “We’re on the same side and we need your _help_.”

There are a few seconds of tense silence, both Lance and Oliver ready to spring at each other again in a split second’s notice. Neither gives ground.

But Lance decides to give them a chance, after a flickering glance at Felicity. She leaves a time and a place, and tells them to meet her tomorrow. She’s out in 4 seconds flat and Felicity feels the relief turn her knees to jelly.

Oliver is bleeding and bruised and that cut on his arm would need stitches, but they have to go somewhere else first before they get arrested. Oliver doesn’t even pause. He gathers their bag packs and they are out and moving before Felicity can even get a word out.

She stitches him up in a dingy motel room at the backend of nowhere, hands steady despite the adrenaline and the fatigue and the worry. He looks her in the eye the whole time, same as he always does.

But this time, after she is done and wraps his cut in clean bandages, she curls one hand at the back of his neck and closes in on him just as his arms comes around her back to pull her closer. It’s there that she finally release the breath she had been holding since she saw Sara Lance pointing a Berretta at his head.

“I’m fine.” He says, his breath ruffling the hair curling at the back of her neck.

She just holds him tighter for another moment, swallowing her heart down where it belongs. His warm breath sneaks past the collar of her shirt, warming the skin over her heart. There is no awkwardness in holding him like that even though she’s never touched him like this before ever since he put a gun in her hand and told her to count to ten before shooting straight ahead. ( _she’s shot the man who would have killed her coming through the door right in the lung. She’d been too restless not to ask him how he’d known that man would have come through her door at that moment, but he hadn’t answered. Now she doesn’t have to ask_ ) They’ve been surviving of each other for months and the pure elation of just not fucking dying shakes them both. There is pure comfort in the gesture and she feels him relax too as she threads her fingers at the fine hair at the back of his neck.

In truth, the strangeness is in opening her eyes to how hard her life has gone sideways in the last few months. She is holding an assassin in her arms, taking comfort that he is still alive and he is allowing himself to be comforted. In times like these, times when they take each other’s hands and run, when he shields her and she hacks into security systems as fast as humanly possible so that he doesn’t have to risk bullets, the distance between them thins to nothing.

It’s a tacit pact they have made, to give each other silence as comfort without the shadow of their history weighting on them. Give each other what they need and put the rest aside for a few moments of simply being human and needing warmth and the safety of someone who cares.

Felicity doesn’t know how these moments affect him, but every time he shows her hints of vulnerability, she feels it like a stab-wound. Every time she feels herself needing him, every time she resists touching him, just to make sure he’s okay, talking to him just to talk, it hurts a little more.

The closer she gets to him, the more her sins weight on her shoulders.

After Felicity steps back and hands him a clean shirt to wear, she tells him in her serious-voice that she would go with him tomorrow. She has seen enough of what Oliver and Sara Lance are capable of doing to each other and is not about to leave their future in the hands of two people wired like bombs who only see each other and asses threat levels. She is going to be their buffer, she tells him, so they don’t end up killing each other in the street with a toothpick.

“Well, to be fair I never used a toothpick before.”

She rounds on him. “That is what you took from that sentence?”

Oliver lets out a long suffering sigh. He tries to hold firm when he tells her no, that she can’t and risk her getting hurt in the confrontation. Felicity holds firm in their need to avoid a confrontation altogether. She keeps holding on to that even when he gets angry at her stubbornness. His anger is stillness of frame, tenseness of muscle and glacial eyes drilling at her skull. She gets reasonably cautious when he gets like that, but she won’t budge on this.

She doesn’t insist with too many words - just the bare bones.

"You know I’m right. We need her and you two are too dangerous to each other to trust each other. You know I have to be there."

“As collateral?” He grits out, lips thin.

“Yes.” Precisely that. And she doesn’t even have to say it out loud. ‘ _Precisely for the reason you made sure to keep me alive the first time_.’

He turns away, gracing the opposite wall with his scowl.

It’s in moments like this when she hates the lies that vulnerability brings out in both of them. They may need each other, shoved into an impossible situation and bonding out of sheer need to survive. But they still are each other’s worst nightmare and that is not likely to change.

-

The second time they meet Lance, it’s in a bar at a quiet part of town. The center of the city is close enough so that the small square is crowded and there are enough people around to give both parties the safety of a clean escape if its needed.

No man's land. As good a place to meet as any.

Lance is not an easy woman to convince. There is a steeliness, a coldness to her eyes that doesn’t recede. Felicity knows about Laurel Lance, about how she was killed almost the same time as her sister started a chain reaction that ended with the DoD’s more obscure programs being exposed – one of which had been the Arrow project.

Lance is not that interested on helping them, but then Felicity explains him just what exactly it means if they don’t do anything at all. Lyla Michaels may be intent on clean up house but there are so many things she doesn’t know. Oliver is sure enough about that - if she had known, she would have already made it public. And HIVE… HIVE is exactly the kind of thing the Arrow program wanted to be when it grew up.

Felicity’s tinkering with the genetics of it all had made that possible.

The coldness in Lance’s eyes when Felicity explains that makes her want to flinch. She feels Oliver tensing beside her, coiling as if he was about to strike, so she relaxes purposefully, wills herself not to be afraid.

It doesn’t work, but she keeps talking anyway. Her voice is steady, barely a tremble in it.

“The project is up and running, and I doubt Michaels knows about it, or has any proof to attest what it’s doing. Even I wasn’t aware it had started until some months ago, after we hacked some of the more obscure servers of Unidac. It shouldn’t have – I tried to…” she sighs, bypasses that whole line of thought as irrelevant. “The point is, HIVE agents are unstable and at one point or another they either will get themselves killed because they don’t have enough self-preservation to avoid it, or their body will deteriorate and shut down on them.”

This catches Oliver’s attention, as well as Lance’s. For different reasons, Felicity knows.

"Why is that?" Oliver asks, and she can see the question behind the question.

_Is that a possibility for me too?_

Felicity feels her hand itching with the need to reach out.

She links her fingers together in her lap.

"They wanted HIVE to be like Arrow, in the basics, but without the emotional noise. That means no fear, empathy, grief, guilt - no human emotion of any kind." Felicity gulps the thick node in her throat. "In itself, tinkering with the side of the DNA that controls emotional reactions is hardly ever a good idea - there is no way to guarantee stability. But its more than that. The secret to the stability of the Arrow formula was that the alterations were small enough to be manageable. And even then, until the effect set in and became stable, each of the agents had individual adaptations made to the formula of the meds they took, depending on how their organism reacted to them.” Felicity turns her eyes to Oliver, cautions. “I was the one designing the compounds for each of you, adapting the formula to the state of your organism so that it would not destabilize it."

"That's why I had more frequent physicals in the beginning?" Oliver asks softly, almost speaking to himself.

Felicity nods. "There was no way to predict how your body would react so we had to move in time with it and listen to what it was telling us."

She very carefully avoids mentioning the words 'subjects' and referring to the agents with numbers. It had been a conscious effort to suppress a habit that had been years in the forming. The way Oliver looks at her tell Felicity he knows exactly what she's doing.

"You played hit and miss with them." Lance says, the smile on her face almost a sneer.

Felicity feels her spine straighten, anger threading into her forced calmness, pushing the fear away if only a little.

"I have never claimed to being a decent human being and what I helped create, what I did, proves that. But professionally speaking, Miss Lance, playing 'hit and miss' with my patients has never been among my sins." She says frostily.

Not that she expects the tone to have any sort of effect on him.

"The point I was trying to make is that because the changes are wider and there is no guarantee to them remaining stable, HIVE is essentially a self-destructing program. I pointed that out _very_ clearly in my report and made it known that until all of the Arrow agents were viraled off the meds so that we could have stable results, starting HIVE would be a waste of lives."

And yet, that program had been up and running for a year. It had had twelve dead subjects before it could stabilize the results enough for them to have a viable one. One became five and then eight.

Four of them had died so far.

“What else do you know.” Lance asks.

“Only what I already told you. I didn’t have clearance to know more than that, and didn’t apply to get it." Felicity takes a deep breath. "This has to stop."

And who better to stop it than the one that had made it all possible in the first place? Felicity feels there is a sort of cathartic justice to that. All the shit she had been elbow-deep in would come to light and that was right. It was fair.

But there was also her own justice: they were distorting her work, making it into something ugly and she wanted it to be over. And even though she had had no part in HIVE, even though she had not made the decisions on how to train even the Arrow participants, where to send them and who to kill, what Oliver had said to her in the forest of Maryland that first day after saving her life still stood true. She may not have pulled the trigger but she had been the one that loaded the gun.

The responsibility for that was starting to set in harder the more she understood of what exactly had been done with her help. To what she had contributed in her perseverance for science and medicine. The feeling of being utterly used and abused and then thrown away to some unmarked grave, was finally starting to make her angry enough to want to fight back.

"It doesn’t matter what they call it, Lance. Whether its League, or Arrow or HIVE, it’s always the same because it’s the same fucks running things. It will _never_ be over."

But Lance shakes her head, eyes on the table, not seeing it at all.

"I didn’t start this to expose people.”

“It doesn’t matter, don’t you get it? Your intentions mean shit!” Felicity hisses, leaning forward. “We’re not here for what you _meant_ to do. We’re here for what you _did_.”

Sara Lance fixes her unnerving blue eyes on her, and Felicity feels exposed in her anger. She clears her throat.

“And because we need your help to do it again.” She added, sitting back in her chair again.

Lance is silent for a long time. She flips her phone between her fingers as she thinks it over. When Oliver starts to get antsy, Felicity takes his hand and squeezes his fingers tight, telling him to cool his fucking horses because if lance is thinking about it than her answer is going to be yes. She is the categorical kind, felicity had realized that the moment they met her.

She’s not thinking. She’s planning.

“There is no room on an op like this for tourists.” Lance finally says, looking at Felicity.

“I don’t see any around.” Felicity says calmly.

Lance raises one eyebrow at her.

“I can hack into anything that comes my way.” Felicity explains, trying not to show her irritation. “It tends to come handy when ‘hit them really hard in the face’ kinds of solutions aren’t immediately preferable.”

Lance smiled then for the first time, showing teeth. Felicity wished she hadn’t.

“I thought you were in genetics.”

“I have a second major. Do you want my resume? I’ll send it to you.”

Lance laughs then, a throaty sound, warm and almost genuine. “No, I think I’d rather see you at work and decide for myself.”


	3. 3. Lyla Michaels

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this story, ARGUS is run by Lyla, and it's trying to sort of clean up the huge mess that the DoD and Unidac (the private contractor for which Felicity worked for, that came up with the genetic research for 'bettering' humans) left behind.

“I see you’re alive, Doc. We weren't that sure you would be, but when have I ever been that lucky?” Lyla walks into the room like she owns it. Which she does and surveys Felicity Smoak like she is just another item on her to-do list. Which she is.

“Now that you’re here though, I’m honestly torn between putting you in a hole and throwing away the hole; and feeding you to the wolves that have been after your ass for two years and counting.”

John hangs back, eyeing the Felicity Smoak carefully. She looks for all intents and purposes as if she isn’t there at all. Her expression is absolutely vacant. Lyla’s words don’t seem to register, which - seeing that John does not doubt their sincerity or Lyla’s impeccable ability to see threats through - is either impressive or alarming, depending on which side of the fence one stands on.

But they had both been warned that the patient was unresponsive, so Lyla presses on without missing a beat.

“My compliments, you survived longer than I ever thought a civilian would. Having Queen fall for you was a _genius_ move though, I must say. Stone cold, but genius none the less." Lyla chuckles, her amusement seemingly perverse, though John knows her well enough to know that she is as amused as Felicity Smoak looks.

"I am curious, I really am, of how you managed to break through the conditioning of one of the most harshly trained governmental agents in the last 20 years and make him codependent. When what he _should_ have done is drop you like a stone the moment you became dead weight.” Lyla grabs the end rails of Smoak’s bed and leans into it. “Because make no mistake, that is what you were. Got him shot and stabbed and blown up for his trouble too, but hey, at least _you_ made it out alive!"

Lyla shakes her head almost in wonder. “Genius indeed. You have managed to show me something I haven’t seen in a long time, Miss Smoak: a woman worthy of her reputation.”

It’s only years of practice – and the fact that John is very good at what he does – that keeps him from flinching at the Lyla’s tone.

Likewise, both tone and words finally draw a reaction from the seemingly catatonic doctor turned patient.

Smoak’s eyes moved to the Lyla’s face almost sluggishly. John knows it is not because of the drugs - she had not been dosed that heavily. Most likely she is just reeling from shock, even now. And besides, the glint of awareness within those sunken eyes is too sharp for Felicity Smoak to be anything but perfectly lucid… if a bit on the unstable side of shell-shocked. Her eyes are the only part of her that looks remotely alive

When Felicity Smoak makes eye contact with her, Lyla drops the act, her face settling into a stony look.

"You're lucky your experiment worked out so well, Doc.” Lyla says softly. “Cause if I had it my way, you'd be rotting someplace deep, dark and forgotten by now." And Lyla’s scowl deepens. "After the way you motherfuckers at Unidac treated those bastards like they were your science fair project, you don’t deserve the courtesy of humane treatment."

The doc's eyes glint as if she were suffering a fever.

"What a refreshing point of view." she says, voice gravelly and uneven.

Lyla smirks, though it looks more like a half-contained snarl.

"Trying to seek penance, doc?" She scoffed out a little chuckle at that. "Save it for the tourists."

The smile on Felicity Smoak’s face is… distractingly unnatural. "I have come to believe that the only way to survive one's sins is to acknowledge them. I owe no penance to you though, whoever you are, so do not flatter yourself."

"Lyla Michaels, former vice of the CIA and as of three years ago, Director of ARGUS. And to start with, you owe penance to nine people, _your_ people by the way, who are now too dead to care."

The reaction to that headcount is immediate and arresting: Smoak goes utterly still, doesn’t even breathe for a very long moment. Recognition, or something like it, is in the infinitesimal tilt of her chin. Something quick and sharp passes through her eyes, her face paling into a vague shade of grey.

"Feeling sorry you lost your best asset, Doc?" Lyla teases. It’s cruel, in a way, but they really do need to understand where Smoak’s head is, and where her heart is, as well... if she has one at all.

Lyla seems to be convinced that the answer to that is no, and she is pushing hard for that confirmation. But the doc only takes a deep breath ( _and John can practically hear it rattle in her chest_.) He feels a sliver of discomfort with the situation, but it is buried beneath cool professionalism.

"I seem to understand you hold a very marked disgust for me, Director."

Lyla snorts.

"You’re entitled to your feelings, of course.” Smoak continues after clearing her throat. “I am not one to judge, but in the interest of full disclosure, allow me to ask you something: Where is Amanda Waller? Right now, where is she? What is she doing? Slade Willson? Blood, Crane? Do you even know? Isabel Rochev is dead, so I guess that is a moot point. What about Merlyn Global – why haven’t you investigated there? And Stellmore International – let me guess, you’re just biding your time?"

Felicity Smoak is trembling, hands fisted in her lap, but her voice, though rough around the edges, is steady as she leans forward half an inch, eyes alight. "Where the fuck is Malcolm Merlyn, Director? Did he just… slip through the cracks?"

Lyla says nothing. She keeps staring at the doctor, who by the way now looks like she would happily be tearing at their throats if she wasn’t chained to her bed.

It’s just a moment though. Then it passed and Felicity sits back, impassive, unblinking and unfeeling, giving them a dead stare that is the mirror image of the one her husband had given them not even that two hours ago, in his own isolated cell.

"I appreciate your dedication to justice, Director. It’s admirable. But until those still-breathing from the list of gentlemen above are locked in a deep dark cell right next to mine, I suggest you take your righteous bullshit and shove them back up that tight asshole you've been spouting them out of."

The smile she gave them could cut glass. It made her split lip start bleeding again, as it were. "Or as you might say, save it for the tourists." Smoak adds.

There is a tense moment of silence in which Felicity Smoak goes back to staring at the sheets on her bed, and Lyla huffs out the first genuine smile he has given since she stepped in.

"Well, I'll be dammed. That unhinged asshole downstairs telling the truth, wasn’t he?"

But Doctor Smoak is either too exhausted to react of she simply doesn’t see the point to it, so she remains motionless. Which is just about the time when Lyla loses her patience for games and introduces John, telling the Doc empathetically that she would be his problem now.

John gave her a small smile when she looked up.


	4. 4. John Diggle

“Is this an interrogation or a conversation?” she asks after the first few unanswered questions. John smiles his very own harmless smile that made him look as unassuming as a doorknob.

“It can be conversation, as long as your clearance level allows it, Doctor.”

Felicity Smoak looks at him impassively. “Is my husband alive?”

“Yes.”

Her attention shifts to him immediately, hard and sharp, those eyes unsettling considering the laser-focus she seems to have on him is an exact mirror of the one John had gotten from said husband when he’d asked that same question about her.

“Is he being detained somewhere?”

“No, Doctor. Your husband is an acting agent of ARGUS now, on probationary time. I’m afraid I cannot tell you where he is stationed at the moment.”

Slowly, emotion breaks on the young woman’s face and the effect is almost frightening with how it changes her, how less consumed she suddenly looks.

“Does he know _I’m_ alive?”

John nods. “He has been informed on your condition.”

And that was usually the point where the smart ones and the experienced ones started doubting it as too good to be true. Felicity Smoak is, at this point, both.

“Are you lying to me John Diggle?”

John doesn’t smile this time. Knowing even as little as he does of this woman, he can still sense that it would be the wrong thing to do.

“No doctor. Barring any accidents, Oliver Queen is scheduled to come back to base in a month’s time. You should be able to meet him yourself then.”

The doc doesn’t even blink at that. Doesn’t looked relieved either. She’d believe that when she saw it happen. Of course she would.

“My turn now Doctor. Would you be willing to answer some of my questions.”

Smoak stares unblinkingly at him for a couple of moments then sighs and leans back on her uncomfortable chair.

There is something in her eyes now, some thought or changed perception that John can’t immediately identify – but that still makes her seem softer towards him.

“Fair is fair I suppose, Mister Diggle. May I call you simply Diggle? Saying both words every time seems somewhat pretentious.”

“Of course.”

"I prefer Miss Smoak. If this _conversation_ goes well, you may call me Felicity." And this time there is something like earnestness in her face when she gives him the frailest smile he’s ever seen. "I have not been a doctor in a long time you see. That also feels pretentious."

"Of course Miss Smoak. Now, I'd like to start in Singapore."

He asks her about what had happened after Oliver had woken after being viraled off, how they recognized the HIVE agent. He asks her to describe the confrontation and her role in it. And he does register her surprise at not being asked about her work before that, but John is too smart to prod her with that one just yet. Instead he asks her about her and Oliver Queen’s locations after Singapore and tries to construct a timeline of their movements.

She tells him everything, holds back very little, and most of it had to do with details partaking her husband and his particular set of skills or what she perceived as his weaknesses. Lyla had been sure that the Smoak had just been using or somehow manipulating Queen into helping her stay alive, but the more they speak, the more John understands that the situation had been somewhat different

When the silence stretches a bit, John finds himself being very carefully observed.

He allows her to look.

"If I may, Diggle: why Singapore? Why aren’t you asking me about the Arrow program and my research?"

John smiles. "All in good time. It would be useless to assure you now of my intentions, but time will speak of them better, and whenever you are ready to share that part of your past, I will be listening."

She is visibly taken aback by that answer. The distrust she has for governmental agencies was bone deep and given her experience, John can understand why that is. Her and Queen’s history is why Lyla had wanted him to handle their case personally.

"As for why Singapore, that was when you and your husband came under ARGUS’s radar, and what tipped us off to the HIVE program."

He manages to surprise her, with that. But it only lasts a moment before it sowers.

"You've known about HIVE since Singapore? That was almost two years ago."

There is disgust in her tone; it’s concealed, but those eyes, even opaque as they are, cannot hide all her feelings when her feelings burn that bright.

"We did. We could not however interfere. ARGUS has heavy weight to swing, but not even we can play god to separate governments."

Her expression gets opaque, and John can practically hear her thinking 'of course not' in a dry tone that seems to match the look she is giving him.

"We could however keep other interested parties from interfering with those that had a direct interest in shutting HIVE down."

Her eyes snap to him, surprised again and uncomfortable with that fact. She considers him coldly for a very long moment.

"I don’t believe you." she says simply, calm and sure, without the barest hint of defensiveness or anger.

John nods.

"I imagined you wouldn’t. I do hope that in time, we will both learn to believe one another, Miss Smoak."

She doesn’t think so, it’s plain to see on her face. John however doesn’t falter. He never has before, not in front of anything and that too is another reason why Lyla had chosen him for two of the arguably, most difficult recruits they have ever had to date


End file.
